


anything that wasn't built to destroy

by shesthesmoke



Series: spend my life as a loaded gun [3]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Cognitive Dissonance, Gen, because character development reasons, flint is digging his feet in, michael + the manes bros playing hot potato with that guitar, michael is growing, michael's bedside manner is mediocre, spoiler it was originally flint's guitar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25096606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shesthesmoke/pseuds/shesthesmoke
Summary: michael returns something to its original owner
Relationships: Forrest Long/Alex Manes (mentioned), Michael Guerin & Flint Manes, Michael Guerin/Alex Manes (mentioned)
Series: spend my life as a loaded gun [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1806151
Comments: 13
Kudos: 47





	anything that wasn't built to destroy

Hospitals fucking suck. Flint is tired, and he feels like shit, and being here isn’t helping. He’s seen Kyle three times, Alex twice, and Greg came once but didn’t stay more than twenty minutes. He hates it here with a passion reserved for few things. 

The problem is that he knows what’s here and he doesn’t know what’s next. The last time he didn’t know what was next and didn’t have any way of finding out, he was probably thirteen. Seventeen years of having a plan, and now the absence is clawing at him. 

Michael Guerin is standing in the doorway. Flint’s blood turns to ice. “What are you gonna do?” If he’s here to return the favor, Flint is absolutely fucked. On the bright side, he’ll be able to give Alex an “I told you so” from beyond the grave, but at the moment that’s a wildly less attractive prospect than staying alive. 

Guerin rolls his eyes. “Hey, I come in peace.” His relaxed tone only serves to piss Flint off. Of course he’s relaxed, he’s not the one in a hospital bed still waiting for his full range of motion to come back after some monster tried to kill him. And even if Flint wasn’t, despite everything his dad drilled into his head for years, Flint knows that the biggest difference between them is this: Michael isn’t a soldier. No one counting on him, nothing to protect. You can’t predict how someone is going to react if they don’t care about anything. 

Alex. Guerin cares about Alex. Flint still can’t wrap his head around why, exactly, one of them would get so attached to a human, but that doesn’t change the fact that Guerin did. And not just any human, a Manes. He’d either picked Alex on purpose to try and undermine the entire family, or he was just remarkably stupid. His father had always insisted it was the former, that Alex was in grave danger and needed to be protected, but all the evidence Flint has seen in the last few weeks points to the latter. 

It doesn’t explain why he’s here, though. Flint only gets more confused as Guerin holds up a guitar. 

“I just got a guitar for myself,” he starts to explain, as if Flint has any reason to care, “so I figured I should return this one that Alex and I have been passing back and forth for the past ten years. He said it was his brother’s, so I tried to give it back to Greg before he left town, but…”

Flint finally recognizes the guitar.

“…Greg says it’s not his, he never learned to play,” Michael finishes. 

All things considered, twelve years isn’t that long ago, but it is when suddenly made to face a piece of wood that you hadn’t even thought about because you just needed to  _ get out, go. _

It doesn’t matter what he would’ve done with the guitar if he had given it a second thought, anyway. None of them were made to make music except Alex. And if Alex decided he was going to share that music with Michael Guerin out of everyone else in the world, Flint could be upset about it but he couldn’t really say he was surprised. 

Flint can’t even begin to formulate a response to any of this. “Why are you here?”

“I told you before,” Guerin replies. “I was a good person until I was provoked. And the guy who provoked me? He’s dead. I’m extricating myself from his legacy. Now, I’m assuming you don’t want me over there and you definitely don’t want me using my evil scary brain powers to float it to you, so I’m gonna leave it here and you can get it when I’m gone, or you can ask Kyle or whoever’s in here next to bring it over.”

Extricating? “What about Alex?”

Guerin shrugs. “He still means a lot to me, but I’m stepping back.” 

“Greg said he had a boyfriend,” Flint says, trying to see if he can get a reaction.

Michael just nods. “Forrest’s a nice guy. Well, nicer than me, at least. Alex deserves to be happy.”

“That doesn’t make you angry?” Flint keeps pushing. 

Michael shrugs. “I know this is confusing for you, but I don’t own him. He chose to be with me, and now he’s choosing to be with someone else. There are choices I hope he’ll make, sure, but I don’t make them for him. Get it through your head, there’s no alien brain magic or whatever at play here.”

“You really think that’s gonna work? To convince me that you have no ulterior motives?” Flint asks.

Michael shrugs again. “Honestly, I don’t care about convincing you one way or the other. If you thought I was a monster with no soul, you wouldn’t have taken Alex to get to me. And if you were a monster with no soul, you would’ve kept your hands clean and left him with Jesse. There’s something we agree on. Leave me and my siblings alone, and we don’t have to see each other ever again. Got it?”

Flint doesn’t say anything.

  
“Listen, I’m not sorry your dad’s dead, but I’m sorry it had to happen like that. Losing family sucks, especially when you don’t get to say goodbye.” There’s no  _ doesn’t it? _ because he’s not rubbing it in. “Bye, Flint.”

**Author's Note:**

> aaah i feel like michael might've been ooc in this but idk


End file.
